Minor in possession

CHAPTER 3

Louise Crenshaw wore sobriety like the full armor of Christ. Her nails ended in long sharpened talons polished to a brilliant magenta. She consistently wore the kinds of dress-for-success costumes that would have been far more appropriate for hawking securities on Wall Street than they were for riding roughshod over a herd of hapless recovering drunks. Rumor had it that she had come to Ironwood Ranch as one of the first fulltime counselors, married her boss Calvin Crenshaw without much difficulty, and immediately assumed the throne.

The lady's age was difficult to determine. Her skin had that transparently fragile and stretched look that comes from having had more than one meaningful encounter with a plastic surgeon. Even the most skillful face-lift technique hadn't entirely erased the road-map ravages caused by years of hard drinking and chain smoking.

Her husband, Cal, was a pudgy dough-boy of a man whose group-session drunkalogue chronicled years of failure at everything from running an auto dealership to selling computerized office products. He had finally sobered up and was wanting to help others do the same when his mother died leaving him sole owner of the aging Ironwood Ranch. Cal had decided to turn his inheritance into a treatment center. To hear him tell it, he was well on his way to screwing that up as well when Louise came along at just the right time and saved his bacon.

Cal himself seemed content to hover vaguely in the background while his front-office wife appeared to be everywhere at once-overseeing admissions, dropping in and out of group-session discussions, personally directing everything from how the laundry was run to what went on in the kitchen.

Louise was a formidable woman, particularly when crossed, but I was provoked enough myself that morning that I was actually relishing the approaching confrontation when I heard her high heels beating an angry staccato down the tiled hallway toward the office where I waited.

"How dare you!" she demanded shrilly as she strode into the office and slammed the door behind her. I may have been spoiling for a fight, but she was the one who set the tone of our meeting.

"How dare I what?" I asked, striking a deliberately provoking, nonchalant pose.

Louise Crenshaw bristled, infuriated that much more by my offhand attitude. Setting her mouth in a thin, grim line, she stepped around to the other side of a plain oak desk and sat down facing me. She was making a supreme effort to control herself, but the results weren't entirely successful. I noticed that her brightly tipped fingers closed tightly over the ends of the chair armrests even as she leaned back to regard me with a studied look of arch contempt.

"You're a bully, Mr. Beaumont, and you know it. How dare you browbeat Lucy Washington into letting you call the sheriff's department?"

The previous night's lack of sleep hadn't left me feeling particularly charitable toward anyone, most especially Louise Crenshaw. During our verbal battle over whether or not to report the car incident, Lucy Washington had invoked Louise's name over and over. According to Santa Lucia, Mrs. Crenshaw had decreed an unwritten but nonetheless inviolable rule that she and only she was to notify the authorities of any irregularities involving Ironwood Ranch and its residents. But at four-thirty that morning the Crenshaw answering machine had been the only one in the household taking phone calls.

I had finally overruled Lucy Washington's objections by simply picking up the telephone and making the forbidden call myself.

"Let me point out that my car had been stolen, Mrs. Crenshaw. Why the hell shouldn't I report it?"

"Oh, come now, Mr. Beaumont. Stolen? Aren't we being a bit melodramatic? Joyriding is more like it. After all, I understand the car is safely back in the parking lot this morning. I believe it was already there by the time you made your forcible phone call to Deputy Hanson up in Yarnell. Isn't it far more likely that Joey just borrowed it?"

My temper flared not only at her tone but also at her holier-than-thou attitude. "No, he didn't borrow it," I replied shortly, "because the word ‘borrow' implies my giving permission, which I most certainly did not. He took the keys out of my desk without asking. I don't know where he went with it, but according to the rental agreement, it's been driven several hundred miles since I picked it up at the airport. I drove straight here. That couldn't be more than seventy-five miles at the outside."

She frowned. "Your family is here this week. Isn't it possible one of them used the car?"

"They came in their own cars," I replied. "And I haven't been anywhere near the Grand AM since I checked in other than to walk by it in the lot on my way to Group."

The magenta nails moved swiftly from the armrest to the desktop, where she tapped them thoughtfully.

Sitting there eyeball to eyeball with Louise Crenshaw, I somehow failed to mention the. 38, and not because it slipped my mind, either. At the moment the fact that Joey Rothman had fired my Smith and Wesson worried me a whole lot more than the idea of his taking the car, but what was the point of bringing it up? I figured there'd be enough hell to pay if and when Madame Crenshaw discovered that the gun existed at all. In the meantime, what she didn't know didn't hurt her.

"Speaking of Deputy Hanson, where the hell is he?" I grumbled. "He told me he'd be here between six-thirty and seven, and it's already after seven. How far are we from Yarnell anyway?"

Louise sat up in her chair, rested her elbows on the desk, folded her hands together, leaned her chin on them, and smiled an icy smile.

"I called Mike's office this morning as soon as I learned what was going on. It seemed to me that the situation didn't merit his making a special trip."

"Are you telling me you told him not to come?" I sputtered.

Louise gave me another chilly, condescending sneer. "If you'll just allow me to finish, Mr. Beaumont. I told Mike I didn't think it was necessary for him to make a special trip down here just for this, but he said he was coming to Wickenburg anyway. In fact, he would have been here by now, but the dispatcher said there's been another incident of some kind, an emergency situation down-river a mile or so. He'll stop by here when he's finished with that."

We sat there for some time glaring at one another. Louise Crenshaw was somebody who thrived on playing power games with other people's lives. Not only playing, but playing and winning. I've no doubt she was personally effective in treating some of the patients who came through Ironwood Ranch, but for those who crossed her, for those who didn't take her word for the gospel and who fought back, she was bitch on wheels.

Finally, conceding at last that I wasn't going to break the long silence, Louise crossed her arms. "So where is he?" she asked.

"Who, the deputy? You tell me."

"I don't mean the deputy. Where's Joey Rothman?"

"Beats hell out of me. By this time, he's probably sound asleep in his own little beddy-bye. I'm not in the habit of policing his nighttime forays."

"He's not there. Cal just went up to check." She paused and cocked her head to one side. "What do you mean ‘nighttime forays'? You said before that there are several hundred unaccounted miles on your car. Are you saying he's done this before, been out past curfew and left the premises?"

"Joey Rothman is always out after curfew," I said, taking real pleasure in the two small blotches of color that suddenly appeared on Louise Crenshaw's pallid cheeks. "Maybe you should tell Cal to try looking in Michelle Owens' cabin," I suggested helpfully.

She sat bolt-upright in her chair then with both hands clenched around the edge of her desk. "What do you know about that?" she demanded.

I shrugged. "You know. The usual gossip-that Michelle Owens is knocked up and that Joey's the soon-to-be-daddy."

She paled at that and sat up straighter. "That's not exactly gossip. That's inside knowledge. The results of Michelle's pregnancy test weren't known until late last night. How did you find out?"

"Word gets around," I said shrugging noncommittally.

"You're not going to tell me where you heard it?"

I didn't see any reason to drag Guy Owens into the discussion. Worrying about his daughter, he already had enough on his mind. "No," I replied, standing up. "Is that all?"

"It isn't all," Louise Crenshaw returned sharply. "Not by any stretch of the imagination. If Joey Rothman has been out of his cabin past curfew every single night, why haven't you reported it before this?"

"In case you haven't noticed, being your brother's keeper went out with Cain and Abel."

"Mr. Beaumont, Joey Rothman is here for treatment."

"So am I, lady," I pointed out. "My treatment and nobody else's. I'm not paying good money to come here and baby-sit some young punk who's walking around with his brains in his balls, someone who told me Ironwood Ranch should be renamed Mustang Ranch II, if you get my meaning, Mrs. Crenshaw."

She met my gaze with a brittle stare. "That will be all, Mr. Beaumont."

"You're damned right that's all, because I'm tired and hungry. I'm going to go have breakfast. When the deputy gets here, call me." With that, I stalked out of the office, leaving Louise Crenshaw sitting alone at her desk in isolated splendor.

As I walked toward the dining room and smelled the enticing odors coming from the kitchen, I realized just how hungry I was. Good food is a major part of Ironwood Ranch's treatment program. The idea is that addicts shove all kinds of unhealthy substances into their bodies while neglecting most other forms of nourishment. I had expected the normal tasteless institutional fare, but the cook, a short but exceedingly wide and usually smiling Mexican lady named Dolores Rojas, wasn't the normal institutional cook.

Dolores and her husband, a bowlegged cowboy named Shorty, had been at Ironwood Ranch for twenty years. Her domain was the kitchen, while he ran the stables. Her responsibility was to feed everybody, while his job was as general handyman in addition to looking after the small string of saddle horses that were still used for occasional client trail rides and outings. On the side he boarded and trained a small number of privately owned animals. Dolores and Shorty lived in a modest but immaculate trailer parked down the hill near the stable.

Breakfast wasn't actually served until eight, but I had fallen into the habit of coming down earlier than that for a jolt of Dolores' eye-opening coffee. I would stand there on the sidelines and watch her unhurried but purposeful mealtime preparations. It was through these early morning chats with Dolores Rojas that I had learned scraps of Ironwood Ranch history that weren't necessarily part of the group treatment catechism. In addition, I had picked up some invaluable firsthand knowledge about Mexican cooking.

When I got there that morning, Dolores was busily patting white dough into paper-thin tortillas which she baked quickly on something that looked like an inverted metal disc-maybe part of an old-fashioned plough-which had been placed over one of the gas burners of the immense, old-fashioned stove. Dolores Rojas prided herself in serving only freshly made tortillas.

"What's for breakfast this morning?" I asked, taking my cup of coffee and sidling up to the serving window.

"Chorizo and eggs." she answered.

Prior to Dolores my knowledge of Mexican food had been strictly limited to what was available at a place in Seattle called Mama's Mexican Kitchen and those south-of-the-border aberrations served by various fast-food chains. Dolores dipped out a spoonful of something that resembled reddish-colored scrambled eggs, put it in one of the still-warm tortillas, wrapped it expertly into a burrito, and passed it to me.

"Sausage," she said. "Hot sausage and eggs."

The spicy, eye-watering mixture wrapped in the tortilla bore little resemblance to the sausage and eggs my mother used to make, but it was nonetheless delicious.

"Wonderful," I said, chewing.

Dolores nodded in satisfaction. "Good. Now get out of here and let me finish."

I took the hint, my coffee, and the remainder of my burrito and went over to stand by the window. The rain had let up, at least for the time being. People were beginning to venture out of their cabins and meander up to the main hall although I noticed a group of several people head off in the opposite direction.

Soon Ed Sample, an attorney from Phoenix, joined me by the window. "What's going on down there?" I asked.

"River's up," he said, sipping his own coffee. "Unusual for this time of year, but then so are the rains."

"You mean there's actually water in the river?"

When I first arrived at Wickenburg, I had crossed the bridge over the Hassayampa River on my way to Ironwood Ranch. I recalled seeing an official-looking sign that proclaimed NO FISHING FROM BRIDGE although no water had been visible in the dry, sandy bed. With the onset of the rains, however, a sluggish, muddy stream had appeared.

"Somebody said it's about eight feet deep right now."

"Eight feet?" I repeated, astonished. "Where'd it all come from?"

"Drainage from up in the mountains. As much has soaked into the ground as it can handle. The rest is runoff. From what Shorty Rojas said, it could go over the banks sometime today. By the time all the water drains out of the high country, we could have a real serious problem down here."

"Great," I said. "That's all we need."

Ed Sample looked at me appraisingly. "You ever see a flash flood in the desert, Beau?"

I shook my head.

"Every year or so we get a carload of tourists washed away. They see what they think is a few inches of water in a dip and they end up being washed downstream by a wall of water."

"You mean those DO NOT ENTER WHEN FLOODED signs are serious? They're not some kind of joke?"

"Not at all," he replied.

That gave me something to think about. Maybe the NO FISHING sign wasn't a joke either.

People were beginning to carry filled plates away from Dolores' serving line. I refilled my coffee cup, set it at an empty table near the window, and went to collect my own plate. In addition to the chorizo, eggs, and tortillas, there was also a selection of fresh fruit. Despite my earlier sampler burrito, I was still hungry. I carried my food-laden plate back to the table.

I had barely sat down when Michelle Owens edged into the chair next to me. She looked wan and sallow. Instead of a plate, she carried a cup of hot water and a fistful of saltine crackers. I've been a father, and I know the drill. Saltine crackers are the order of the day for someone suffering from morning sickness. Once more I was supremely grateful that this pale-faced young woman and all of her problems were none of my concern.

"Where's Joey?" Michelle whispered. Evidently her choosing the seat next to mine was no accident.

I glanced at her. Michelle Owens was plain, amazingly plain, hardly the type of girl to appeal to someone with Joey Rothman's flashy sense of panache. Her hair, a dismal, cheerless brown, had a slight tendency to curl at the ends, but there had been no effort made to style it attractively. Her eyes were red and swollen. She wasn't wearing any makeup, and her naturally pale complexion had a grayish tinge to it, probably as a direct result of continuing bouts of morning sickness. She still wore braces. Pregnant and still in braces. No wonder her father was pissed.

"Where is he?" she asked again, more urgently this time. "I went by the cabin to see him, but he wasn't there."

"I'm sorry, Michelle, but I can't help you," I answered kindly. "As far as I know, he never came home at all last night."

Her lower lip trembled and she ducked her head while two fat tears spilled out of the corner of her eye and dribbled down her cheek. "What if my father…" she began, then stopped.

"What if your father what?" I asked.

She shook her head. "Never mind. It isn't important."

Just then one of the counselors, a lame-brain named Burton Joe, brought his plate to our table. He sat down across from Michelle and smiled at her beatifically.

"And how are we this morning?" he asked. It was the medical rather than the royal we, insinuating and saccharine. "Feeling better?"

Michelle Owens kept her eyes lowered and didn't answer. I was outraged. Surely the Ironwood Ranch rumor mill was fully operational, particularly among the counselors. There was no reason to give Burton Joe the benefit of the doubt. He knew good and well whereof he spoke.

"Leave her alone," I snapped. "She's just fine."

I looked around, vainly hoping that Guy Owens would show up and come to his daughter's rescue, but family members weren't encouraged to arrive until a few minutes before the morning counseling sessions began at nine o'clock.

"My, my, we certainly are touchy this morning, aren't we."

"Yes," I replied tersely. "We certainly are. I didn't have much sleep last night and neither did Michelle here, so why don't you bug off and leave us alone."

Burton opened his mouth to say something in return, but just then several more people joined us at our table. They had been part of the expedition that had gone down to see the river, and they were busy speculating about how deep the water was and whether or not we'd have to evacuate some of the cabins if the water came up over the banks.

Under the cover of the table, Michelle Owens reached for my hand and squeezed it. "Thank you," she whispered.

Her gratitude at my small kindness was disconcerting. A forkful of egg and chorizo turned to dry pebbles in my mouth. I was no longer hungry.

"Want to go look at the river?" I asked.

She nodded wordlessly and rose to go, waiting for me beside the door while I took my plate back to the window to be rinsed.

We didn't speak at all as we walked down the muddy path to the Hassayampa. Somehow I got the feeling that there was something Michelle wanted to say to me, but every time she got close to doing it, she drew back, and I didn't force the issue. I couldn't think of any reason for her to confide in me with her problems, and I wasn't about to pry. She seemed to find a certain amount of comfort just being in my presence, and I was content to let it go at that.

When we got to the bank, the river was every bit as spectacular as the other clients had said it was. Off and on during the previous month, I had taken occasional walks along the sandy riverbed without seeing a trace of water, but now four days of rain had transformed it into a rushing, muddy torrent, running from bank to bank, seven or eight feet deep and at least a quarter of a mile wide. I never knew the desert had that much water in it.

Keeping well away from the bank, we stood there for some time watching in dumbstruck silence before Shorty Rojas joined us, shading his eyes against a sudden burst of sunlight as he stared across the raging flood.

"What do you think?" I asked. "Is this as high as it goes?"

He shook his head. "I hear it's still raining up in the mountains," he answered, "and the guy on the radio said it's running about seventy-four thousand cubic feet per second. They're calling it a hundred-year flood."

Michelle Owens looked alarmed. "What does that mean?"

"A flood this bad only happens on an average of every hundred years or so," I explained.

Shorty nodded. "That's what they say," he observed laconically, "but this here's the third one I've seen, so their hundred-year call ain't exactly scientific. I may have to move them horses up to a higher corral." He turned and walked away.

Eventually Michelle and I headed back as well. It was eight-thirty. People would be filtering into the various group-session rooms for the short, early morning mixed group with both clients and family members present. We had just passed Joey's and my cabin when I saw a patrol car go jouncing up the dirt road past the tennis courts. The lights were on. So was the siren.

It almost made me laugh aloud. An hour and a half late and the damn deputy shows up in response to my car prowl call with his lights flashing and siren blaring.

And to think Louise Crenshaw had called me melodramatic.